New Galveston distillery hopes to take ‘moonshine’ mainstream

Bartender Kayla Van De Flier pours a drink at Texas Tail Distillery's Seawall Boulevard location on Saturday, Dec. 29, 2018, in Galveston. Texas Tail distills moonshine in a variety of flavors. It is an offshoot of Texas Tail vodka, which Greg Truex and partner Nick Droege started in Dallas in 2007.

Bartender Kayla Van De Flier pours a drink at Texas Tail Distillery's Seawall Boulevard location on Saturday, Dec. 29, 2018, in Galveston. Texas Tail distills moonshine in a variety of flavors. It is an

Bartender Kayla Van De Flier pours a drink at Texas Tail Distillery's Seawall Boulevard location on Saturday, Dec. 29, 2018, in Galveston. Texas Tail distills moonshine in a variety of flavors. It is an offshoot of Texas Tail vodka, which Greg Truex and partner Nick Droege started in Dallas in 2007.

Bartender Kayla Van De Flier pours a drink at Texas Tail Distillery's Seawall Boulevard location on Saturday, Dec. 29, 2018, in Galveston. Texas Tail distills moonshine in a variety of flavors. It is an

The term “moonshine” comes with a certain connotation: Prohibition-era bootleggers manufacturing illicit clear liquor under the cover of night in a makeshift distillery, a spirit so strong it led to apocryphal tales of turning heavy drinkers blind.

Business partners Nick Droege and Greg Truex, connoisseurs and manufacturers of vodka and whiskey through their brand Texas Tail, are helping break the antiquated stigma of moonshine — shorthand for unaged whiskey made with corn mash — with a distillery that opened in Galveston in late November.

Texas Tail Distillery took over a small storefront that once housed a glass shop in a strip mall on Seawall Boulevard, and the do-it-yourself operation has been met with a warm reception so far from locals who, on a good day, purchase anywhere from 30 to 50 bottles of the distillery’s three labels — Texas Tail Vodka, Coastline Whiskey, and Southern Marsh Moonshine.

Even just before noon on a Saturday morning, a group of six grab seats at the bar, the waves of the Gulf of Mexico crashing beyond the seawall across the street through the storefront’s big glass windows.

“There’s definitely a need for it,” said Marie Kilbourn, a bartender and mixologist at Texas Tail who developed the distillery’s unique menu of cocktails, which includes flavor-infused moonshine such as apple, black cherry and peach. “There’s breweries already, quite a few already on the island. We all are looking for distilleries and wineries too. Everybody travels, and everybody goes to those places wherever they travel, right? For this to be a vacation destination place, and you’re on the seawall in Galveston and to have the first spirits (distillery) here is definitely praised by the community.”

Droege and Truex, who met as college students in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and started the Texas Tail brand in 2013, a moonshine distillery was the natural next step in their evolution as liquor manufacturers. The two started out making homemade beer in college, eventually shifting to vodka after becoming hooked on the Discovery Channel docudrama “Moonshiners” that dramatized the life of people who produce illegal moonshine in the Appalachian Mountains.

After three years of trial and error — “A lot of bad vodka,” Truex said — they sold their first bottle of Texas Tail in November 2013, a 50/50 blend of corn and wheat vodka, and established a small distillery in Dallas, where they also made one-year aged whiskey. But Droege and Truex, who grew up in Friendswood and Alvin, respectively, yearned to tap into the more familiar Houston-area market.

“I grew up fishing in West (Galveston) Bay two to three times a week, I knew whenever we started up there, I told Greg that our plan was that I always wanted to be down in the Houston area, and after we started talking with family and friends and everything, we really honed in on Galveston,” Droege said. “It fit our brand too, Texas Tail was named after hunting and fishing, it really fit us as a company to move to Galveston.”

The shift to moonshine was a result of a consistent stream of feedback from customers to make flavored vodka. Droege and Truex experimented with some flavored recipes to mixed results.

“We tried to use all natural products and when we’re mixing with vodka, everything tasted like candy,” Truex said. “Moonshine’s just a pretty easy to mix - pretty much anything you mix into it will taste like it’s supposed to. You just really can’t take vodka out of something, it’s always gonna have that feel to it.”

It helped that the process to make moonshine was fairly simple by distilling standards, although hardly as crude as burning it over an open flame as the Prohibition bootleggers once did.

In the back of the distillery, a 200-gallon pot still with a vertical copper pipe is the primary piece of equipment used for breaking down, mixing, and distilling the corn whiskey. The vertical pipe on the pot still collects the steam from the concoction, which is then cooled with cold water to turn it into liquid form. The liquid is collected in a transfer tank and then placed in a holding tank where it ferments and is later blended with purified water, then bottled and labeled by hand. The daily yield can range anywhere from 20 to 50 gallons.

“It is something that nobody can just walk in off the street and do,” Truex said. “It’s just knowing how chemistry works and the whole process works and once you do it every day you just have a feel for it.”

Bartenders Kilbourn and Kayla Van De Flier are responsible for making magic out of Droege and Truex’s product with creative cocktail blends. The owners gave Kilbourn free reign to shape the drink menu to her liking. Drinks like the “Hot Summer Pie” — a mix of peach, apple, and black cherry moonshine, hot water, and honey garnished with cinnamon and whipped cream — or the “Gulf Coast Apple Margarita,” which replaces Tequila with apple moonshine, topped with sprite, honey, and an apple slice garnish, are customer favorites.

Kilbourn uses a “farm-to-cocktail” approach, incorporating fresh ingredients in the drink mixes to give the flavors more punch.

“I grow all my fresh herbs, the fresh herbs are all in your drinks,” Kilbourn said. “So the mojitos, I’ll go and pick the mint right off the plant in front of you. I get all the fresh fruits early in the morning. These are all my oranges here, I go into the local markets and get all the fresh fruits, that way I make sure everything I get here is locally grown and you can taste that in your drinks.”

The first month of business at Texas Tail exceeded Droege’s expectations, particularly bottle sales, which flew off the shelves during the holiday season.

“The liquor market has really boomed the last three months of the year, which is really fitting because Galveston goes through a slow period the last three months of the year,” Droege said. “The back’s busy when the front’s not and the front will be busy in the summertime when the liquor industry kind of slows down because everyone’s on vacation. They play off of each other very well.”

The hope is that as the tourist season picks up in the spring, the distillery will be able to expand and acquire another space to handle production and add more staff for the bar. Truex joked that they have been benefiting from the “free labor” of friends and families to help with the bottling process. Eventually, they will advertise “bottling parties” as another element of the distillery business.

“We try to make it fun, we give them some drinks and put on some music. Nothing that we do is extremely hard, but the nature of it can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing,” Truex said.